Obviously, it is a riff on
Dhurandhar: The Revenge is a 2026 Indian Hindi-language spy action-thriller propaganda film written and directed by Aditya Dhar. It is a sequel to the 2025 film Dhurandhar and the final instalment of the duology.
I just watched the sequel—louder, larger, more determined to outdo its predecessor, and on a faster track to make more money than the original which itself was a major box-office success—and (as you know) finished Season 3 of Tehran, where intelligence agencies compete by seeing without being seen. Different geographies, same premise: success lies in deception.
In the 1980s, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard created a new kind of encryption that would be impregnable.
The announcement of the Turing Award to Charles H. Bennett (who was the first person I bumped into at the IBM Reception, thanks Davide Venturelli of NASA/USRA for securing me an invitation, at APS 2019) and Gilles Brassard was for BB84—it was first presented in Bengaluru in 1984. Its core idea is simple: any attempt to observe a quantum system reveals the observer. Not hard to break—impossible to hide.
In 1984, as a student at IIT-Madras, I first encountered Operations Research. I did not know then that it would become my intellectual home—or that, in that same year and a nearby city, BB84 would quietly redefine what security means.
I returned from Bengaluru ten days earlier. Five days after the announcement, my keynote companion paper on How INFORMS can contribute to the Second Quantum Revolution was accepted. The 1984 and 2026 alignment – entanglement? – felt too precise to ignore!
BB84 did more than introduce a new cryptographic protocol—it changed the foundation of security itself. In the classical world, secrecy depends on computational difficulty or hidden keys. In the quantum world, it depends on physics. Measurement disturbs, copying is forbidden, and eavesdropping reveals itself. Security is no longer about making attacks harder, but about making invisibility impossible.
Which raises the question:
Is there such a thing as quantum deception?
No.
Quantum mechanics removes the very moves deception depends on. There is no observing without disturbance, no copying without trace, no interference without consequence. An adversary is not merely constrained—they are exposed. There is no quantum deception—only detection.
The idea itself did not begin in a lab, but in the ocean—Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard first discussed quantum money (see 2024 Tayur Challenge!) while swimming off Puerto Rico. What began playfully became BB84. What became BB84 is now a Turing Award—and, as the New York Times observed, the foundation of an entire field.
If deception is no longer viable—if observation cannot be hidden, if copying leaves traces—then the problem itself changes. The game is no longer about outwitting an adversary in the shadows. It is about operating in a world where the rules are enforced by physics.
This is not the end of strategy. It is its redefinition.
Communication becomes interactive. Security becomes statistical. Systems must be designed to function under noise, loss, and verification. The question is no longer can we hide? but how do we act optimally when we cannot?
That is precisely the domain of Operations Research.
Scheduling under decoherence. Routing under entanglement constraints. Decision-making under intrinsic uncertainty—these are not embellishments; they are what will make quantum systems usable.
The first wave made secure quantum communication theoretically possible.
The next one must make it practically usable.
And that is where we at INFORMS can contribute.
Read the full paper here: How INFORMS can contribute to the Second Quantum Revolution.
